Field
The disclosure relates to intercommunication among wireless small cells, and more specifically to self-calibration and self-organization between small cells in an LTE environment.
Related Art
Conventionally, Small Cells include limited or no self-organization capabilities. Further, such capabilities are often limited to Small Cells within privately held enterprise networks, where the Small Cells are connected to a Local Area Network (LAN), which is often wired. Through the LAN, the local Small Cells establish an X2 interface to exchange information.
These functionalities are generally not provided to heterogeneous Small Cell networks because doing so would have several negative impacts on the base station (HeNB) hardware. For example, in order to successfully perform the conventional self-organizational techniques, HeNBs would need to be outfitted with additional capabilities, such as for example a radio sniffing component. This component enables the HeNBs to support Network Listen Mode functionality, which is specified and recommended by 3GPP to facilitate network information collection by the Small Cells' HeNB. However, adding this functionality introduces additional cost to the HeNB hardware, and also results in higher power consumption by the device. Further, radio sniffing can be a highly inaccurate process, meaning that the reliability of information acquired is insufficient for performing accurate self-organization calculations and other processing.